My housemate, Alexander, relyricized the union standard "The Ballad of Joe Hill" as a slam on Pepco, the energy company that's leaving us to languish in the dark. DCist has picked it up, and has put out a call for local bands to submit covers. The full lyrics are at the link, but there's a preview below. And I promise to update you if any musicians answer the call. I dreamed I saw Pepco last night Driving down my street. “Thank God!” said I, “Our power’s down.” “It never died,” said he... … [Read more...]

I hope you're all already familiar with Dresden Codak's Dungeons and Discourse and Advanced Dungeons and Discourse, which basically make philosophy jokes in a DnD setting. (These two comics are the source of the above image).It turns out that Scott, the guy whose post I was recommending in "The (Epistemic) Floor is Made of Lava," wrote up a plot and songs for a philosophy based DnD campaign. It reminds me strongly of The Phantom Tollbooth. That means his players are facing down Ho … [Read more...]

All week, I've been looking forward to today, but I was mindful that it might be contentious and provoke rancor among my friends. But, ultimately, truth is more important than partisanship, so, come what may, I want to wish you all a very happy Tau Day!As you may remember from math class, pi is approximately 3.14159 and, every year, on March 14th, math geeks tend to celebrate. Pi is what you get when you divide a circle's circumference (the length around the outside) by the diameter ( … [Read more...]

I have a somewhat lengthy post lined up for tomorrow, so, for today, just an amusing story. A group of my friends are playing Dungeons and Dragons, and recently fessed up that I feature in the backstory of one of the villainous characters. One of my friends is playing as a pyromaniac fallen paladin (in DnD, a Paladin is a lawful good character class that are holy knights, consecrated to a particular god in the DnD pantheon).But why is he a fallen paladin? Well, apparently, my friends used … [Read more...]

This post is number twelve of twelve for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon. I'm responding to comments in the "Go Ahead, Tell Me What's Wrong with Homosexuality" thread all day. You can read an explanation of the Blogathon and a pitch for donations (even if you're religious) here.At 9am this morning, we kicked of this blogathon on homosexuality with methodological questions about statistics and social science, and that's how we're going to fracking end it!William Saletan is c … [Read more...]

This post is number eight of twelve for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon. I'm responding to comments in the "Go Ahead, Tell Me What's Wrong with Homosexuality" thread all day. You can read an explanation of the Blogathon and a pitch for donations (even if you're religious) here.At one point in the discussion, Ubiquitous was expanding on Thomist philosophy and laid out a 'prebuttal' (of which I'm excerpting only one idea): In a hale and mature adult human, eyes are for seeing. If … [Read more...]

This post is number two of twelve for the Secular Student Alliance Blogathon. I'm responding to comments in the "Go Ahead, Tell Me What's Wrong with Homosexuality" thread all day. You can read an explanation of the Blogathon and a pitch for donations (even if you're religious) here.At some point in the long discussion of homosexuality, I asked why the Catholic church puts erotic same sex relationships and acts in the same category as erotic male-female acts in the first place. I wa … [Read more...]